Yard Sale Treasure Map App

This Saturday, one of the stops on our yard sale route was an estate sale. The sale was scheduled for 10:00 AM so we hit a few other stops before heading there. As we were pulling up to the house, I told my husband I hoped the line at the estate sale would not be too long. I quickly learned that the yard sale odds were not in my favor on this one. There were so many people waiting to get into this sale, that it looked like the line outside of a concert venue. I was more than a little disappointed when the guy guarding the front door handed me the number "89", and no one had even entered the house yet. As you can imagine, as the 89th person being permitted to enter the home, I had plenty of time to kill while I waited for my turn. What I did to pass the time was strike up conversations with all the other junkers on the lawn. I talked to a bunch of people about a lot of different topics, and during my conversations I discovered something that surprised me. I thought everybody knew the secret to finding all the best yard sales using their smart phone, but I was wrong. Not one of the devoted yard sale shoppers I talked to on Saturday knew about the Yard Sale Treasure Map app, and that got me thinking that there might be a lot more people out there who were still yard saling in the dark ages. If that's the case for you, prepare to have your mind blown.

When I started going to yard sales on Saturday mornings fifteen years ago, the system I used to find nearby sales was complex and labor-intensive. I searched for sales on Craig's List and selected the ones I thought were worthwhile. Then, I planned a route in my head and used Google Maps to construct the route. First, I entered my home address and the address of the first yard sale and printed those directions. Then, that first sale became the departure location in the second set of printed directions and the next yard sale became the destination. This process went on for the better part of Friday evening until I had directions to all the sales I wanted to visit the next morning. It was a true labor of love and clearly illustrated the depth of my devotion to bargain hunting.

The Virginia Slims slogan, "You've come a long way, baby," is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about how much my yard sale mapping experience has changed since those early days. Getting a GPS navigation system for the van many years back was the first major advance in the process. Typing addresses in the GPS was a thousand times easier than the old printout system, but I was still devoting a good part of Friday night to locating the right yard sales on Craig's List and making a list of addresses for the GPS. Then, I got an iPhone a couple years ago, and my world was rocked by one trusty little app.

Shawn Kolodgie may not have any idea who I am, but I am forever indebted to him. Shawn is the creator of the Yard Sale Treasure Map app. This app, available for iPhones and Androids, is designed to help users access local Craig's List garage sales on their mobile device. Users can view local sales in map or list format, view sale details and photos, get directions to the yard sales from their current location, and take advantage of in-app organizational and route planning features. In my opinion, this app is a game changer for yard sale enthusiasts. For me, personally, it revolutionized the way I "do" yard sales on Saturday mornings.

That little blue dot in the photo above represents your current location, and the green pin is your home location. The blue dot travels with you as you move along your route, and the green pin is stationary. You can change the location of the green pin by entering a different zip code into the app when you are looking for yard sales. This is a useful feature if you are home in Philadelphia on a Wednesday, and you want to see what the sale prospects look like at the Jersey shore on Saturday. You just enter the zip code at the shore and violá, you can see the sales that are listed there for Saturday. Each of the red pins is a yard sale listed on Craig's List. When you click a red pin the address of the sale pops up in a tab. When you click the tab, the app takes you to a description of the sale including start time, items for sale, and photos if the yard sale host has posted them.

If you like the contents being offered at a certain sale, you can click the arrow in the blue diamond on the bottom of the screen, and you will be taken to the maps system on your phone. On an iPhone you are taken to Apple maps and Siri takes over at this point giving you turn by turn directions to the yard sale you've selected. This system allows you to plan the most efficient and time saving sale route possible. Yard sale diehards know how important it is to maximize your time when you are trying to squeeze the greatest number of sales in, in a four hour or five window.

The Yard Sale Treasure Map app has only been reviewed 23 times. 20 of those reviews are 5 stars, and that number will be 21 when I get around to adding mine. However, the one user who gave the app a 1 star rating does bring up a good point. In order to access all the necessary features of the Yard Sale Treasure Map app, you do have to pay a $1.99 subscriber's fee. Some people have strong objections to paying for apps on their phone, and if you are one of those people it's not really worth downloading the app at all. What you get for free is not all that useful. It's really that $1.99 fee that unlocks the magic. I'm not going to tell you how to spend your money, but I will say this was the best $1.99 I've ever spent in my life. It helps me find great items like these with ease, and that makes me very happy.

Boonton Melmac Dinnerware

Samsonite Train Case

Cast Iron Ice Wagon 

I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. Do you already use the Yard Sale Mapper app? If so, what do you think about it? Are you going to download the app now that you've read this post? If so, please stop back and let me know what you think about it.